Women's Work, Men's Work: The Informal Slave Economies Of Lowcountry Georgia

Women's Work, Men's Work: The Informal Slave Economies of Lowcountry Georgia

In Women's Work, Men's Work, Betty Wood examines the struggle of bondpeople to secure and retain for themselves recognized rights as producers and consumers in the context of the brutal, formal slave economy sanctified by law. Wood examines this struggle in the Georgia lowcountry over a period of eighty years, from the 1750s to the 1830s, when, she argues, the evolution of the system of informal slave economies had reached the point that it would henceforth dominate Savannah's political agenda until the Civil War and emancipation.